8.18am: Twenty years ago today Margaret Thatcher announced that she was resigning as prime minister. I remember it vividly. I was working for the South Wales Echo in the district office in Caerphilly and a colleague burst in with the news. There was no Twitter in those days; the ultimate in technology was a brick-sized mobile phone and a Tandy computer that squirted stories down a phone line. Thatcher was forced out partly because of her opposition to the ERM (exchange rate mechanism). Twenty years later, the world has changed enormously, but European currency co-ordination, is still dominating the news. George Osborne, the chancellor, has just finished an interview on the Today programme. Speaking about the Irish financial crisis, Osborne acknowledged that he had always been opposed to the euro but added: ""I told you so' is not much of an economic policy." Thatcher would approve.

Today is not going to be as dramatic as 22 November 1990 but there's enough going on to keep me busy. We should hear more about the Irish bailout, and I'll post more on the Osborne interview soon. Grant Shapps, the housing minister, is making a ministerial statement about social housing. And Ed Miliband is back from paternity leave. He has explained his plans to put Labour on "the hard road back to power" in an interview in the Guardian.

As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web.

9.24am: George Osborne will make a statement on the Irish bailout in the Commons this afternoon. In the meantime, here are the highlights from the George Osborne interview. I've taken the quotes from the Press Association and PoliticsHome.

•He said that Britain will offer Ireland a bilateral loan. This bilateral loan will be in addition to support that Britain will offer through the IMF. "What we have committed to do is to obviously be partners as shareholders in the IMF, in an international rescue of the Irish economy, but we've also made a commitment to consider a bilateral loan," Osborne said.

•Britain's contribution to the Irish bailout will be worth around £7bn, he confirmed. Asked if the loan would be worth £7bn, he said: "It's around that. It's in the billions, not the tens of billions." He said the rate of interest the Irish would pay had yet to be worked out. "There is a long established practice for the IMF to judge a particular rate of interest," he said. "I imagine the conditions around the UK bilateral loan will be very similar to those of the rest of the international package."

•He insisted that helping Ireland was in the British national interest. "There are some very particular close economic relationships with Ireland and I think it would not have been in Britain's national interest if Britain had not been part of the package put together by the international community to help our closest neighbour," he said. "Ireland is a friend in need and we're here to help."

•He rejected Tory Eurosceptic suggestions that the government should not be helping Ireland.

I was one of the people in this country who was against Britain joining the euro so I was making all the same arguments that many other people were making about the euro, but 'I told you so' is not much of an economic policy... we've got to do with the situation as we find it and it's in Britain's interest that we get some stability in Ireland.

9.39am: It will be interesting to see how much opposition there is to the Osborne statement about the Irish bailout when he makes it in the Commons. Some rightwingers have already been speaking out. The quotes are from the Press Association and PoliticsHome.

This is from Douglas Carswell, the Eurosceptic Tory MP, who was on the Today programme early this morning.

We shouldn't be paying to help keep Ireland in the euro. If we are going to pay to solve this crisis, we should be helping to pay Ireland to quit the euro. Ireland's misery is only going to end when it has its own currency again. At a time of austerity, again we are paying vast sums to the European Union.

We keep on being told we're not in the euro but the euro turns out to be as much a debt union as a currency and monetary union and it seems we are part of that debt union. I do think we need to recognise this is not in our interests. Ireland and Britain, I think, need an alternative relationship with the EU.

The Irish people, when given the opportunity, have pretty consistently rejected Europe. This is the folly of the Irish politicians. I think there's a danger that our money is being used to prop up their mistakes.

And this is from Sam Bowman, head of research at the Adam Smith Institute.

The proposed bail-out for Ireland is a bad deal for the UK. It puts the interests of the European Union and the eurozone before the interests of Ireland, and the British government should have no part in paying for it. Asking the British taxpayer to cough up £7bn shows just how audacious the European Union has become in its desperation to keep the eurozone project afloat.

The UK successfully avoided entering the eurozone. Ireland was not so lucky, but it entered in full knowledge of the risks involved. Bailing out Ireland now would undo much of the benefits that Britain has yielded from keeping the pound and would make a mockery of the spending cuts announced by the coalition last month. In the end, Ireland will have to choose its own path out of this crisis. But the British taxpayer should not be held responsible for past mistakes by Irish politicians.

10.26am: Grant Shapps, the housing minister, has now published his plans to reform social housing. Predictably (because this is what coalition ministers seem to say about everything), he is describing his plans as "the most radical reform of social housing in a generation". On the news just now I heard a presenter says that the plans mean new social housing tenants will only be offered tenancies lasting two years. Actually, that's not quite correct. Two years will just be an option. Here's a summary of the plans.

•Councils and housing associations will have the option of offering new tenancies lasting for a minimum of two years. Shapps wants to offer social landlords more flexibility, because at the moment they can only offer lifetime tenancies. Shapps says the new system means that councils and housing associations will be able to offer fixed-term tenancies to people who need "a helping hand", but who do not necessarily need subsidised housing for life. This will not affect existing tenants.

•Councils will be able to set their own rules about who qualifies for the waiting list. But the "reasonable preference" categories for those with the greatest housing needs will still apply.

•A new national home swap scheme will be set up to make it easier for people to move from one social tenancies to another.

•Some housing association rents will go up. A new "affordable rent" tenancy will come into affect from April 2011, which will enable housing associations to charge rents worth up to 80% of local market rents. This will supposedly enable them to raise funds to build more affordable homes.

Shapps said he wanted to introduce more flexibility into the system. Around 250,000 social homes are overcrowded, he said, while 400,000 are under-crowded. He also said that over the last 13 years the number of people on waiting lists had almost doubled, rising to nearly 5 million.

For far too long in this country there has been a lazy consensus about the use of social housing, which has left one of our most valuable resources trapped in a system that helps far fewer people than it should. This out-of-date approach has seen waiting lists rocket and is unfair to people who genuinely need social homes. They trap existing tenants in poverty, often in homes that aren't suitable for them.

We'll here more from George Osborne in the Commons. But David Cameron is making a statement about the Nato summit first, at 3.30pm, so Osborne won't be up until around 4.20pm.

10.56am: Housing organisations are starting to respond to the Shapps plans. (See 10.26am.) And they're strongly critical of the proposal for two-year tenancies.

This is from David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation. The NHF represents housing associations.

It's difficult to imagine a more powerful disincentive to do well than the threat of losing your home if you start earning too much. We must ensure that this does not happen. People need the stability and security of a safe home.

And this is from Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter.

From Shelter's 40 years of experience in dealing with those in housing need we know that very few people go from homeless to self-sufficient within two years. The proposal for a minimum of this period shows the government's naivety in how quickly people are able to get back on their feet, and we urge them to reconsider this in favour of at least a five-year minimum.

Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images

11.33am: Gordon Brown's reputation is taking a bit of a battering at the moment. I thought we knew how dysfunctional his premiership was, but as new revelations come out, the picture just gets worse and worse. Jonathan Powell's new book, The New Machiavelli, is stuffed with anecdotes about Brown's failings. At the end of last week the Times published an account of the end of New Labour with plenty of fresh quotes from Brown's colleagues talking about his weaknesses. And now Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge are publishing a new book, Brown at No 10, which contains yet more horror stories.

The Daily Mail has published an extract today. I'll post a full round-up of the papers later, but this article is worth a post of its own. Here are some of the claims Seldon and Lodge are making.

•Brown's phone once had to be rebuilt after he broke it by throwing it against a wall. The "Nokia hitting the wall" story has been around for ages, but I've never heard a detailed account of it. Seldon and Lodge have got one.

Few of the advisers at a meeting in his office in October 2007 will forget seeing the Prime Minister hurl a phone against the wall. The reason? He was furious at having to shoulder the blame when two computer discs, containing the personal details of just about every family in the country, went missing in the post.

Afterwards, the duty clerk collected the pieces of the phone, and No 10's IT staff rebuilt it. Then the duty clerk handed it back to the Prime Minister, saying: 'I think it will work better now.'

•Brown was "the most chaotic prime minister in modern British history", according to the authors. They quote an aide saying: "Gordon has no concept of management. He is incapable of it. He was a hopeless team manager."

•Brown was the first prime minister to use email - and this caused huge problems. "He used it incessantly. So did his staff, flooding his inbox with ­matters that distracted him from the big picture.

"Being able to email him destroyed any hierarchy in No 10. It put huge pressure on ­Gordon personally and broke down the sense of order and cohesion," says one adviser.

•Brown was disappointed by Ed Miliband's "lack of energy, indecision and general ­'fiddling around' during his time as Cabinet Office minister", according to the authors.

•Ed Miliband complained to Brown about Damian McBride. "You can't have a prime minister's press spokesman calling the chancellor a 'cunt' in bars," Miliband is quoted as saying.

•Sarah Brown tried to persuade Brown to let McBride stay after it emerged that he had been spreading scurrilous and untrue stories about Tory MPs. According to the authors, Sarah admired McBride for protecting her family.

•Brown's obsession with minutiae was such that he once rang an aide to ask about progress on a specific cycle lane.

•Barack Obama had to tell a Downing Street aide: "Tell your guy [Brown] to cool it" when he heard Brown erupting with fury at the G20 summit.

•The Queen once said about Brown: "He's such a charmer."

11.45am: We won't get a decision in the Phil Woolas case this week, according to the BBC. Woolas was at the high court last week seeking judicial review of the election court decision forcing him to stand down as MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth on the grounds that he lied about his opponent.

11.52am: You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.

As for the rest of the papers, I've already mentioned the Daily Mail's serialisation of Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge's new book about Gordon Brown. But here are three other articles in the papers worth reading.

The chancellor shares the concerns of senior bankers that new transparency rules could put the City at a disadvantage and lead to some banks shifting activity to New York or other financial centres.

Mr Osborne's change of heart will delight the larger banks, which have mounted a fierce lobbying operation to persuade him to shelve plans for more transparency ahead of a politically charged bonus season in February and March.

•Andrew Grice in the Independent says that a paper prepared for a Lib Dem away-day urged the party's MPs to view their coalition with the Conservatives as a "marriage".

The document, obtained by the Independent, included sections on the "pre-nuptial" stage; "the honeymoon: how to set up house and the first common projects" and "the irritation of living together".

Some of the "rules" for a successful coalition appear to mirror those of a working marriage. "Once the good atmosphere is gone, it is very difficult to get it back," said the report. The Liberal Democrats were also advised not to "show your wounds" when they don't get their own way, as it would only encourage their partners in government to rub salt in them ...

Lousewies van der Laan, former leader of the Dutch social liberal Democrats 66 (D66), who wrote the paper, described the ideal coalition partnership as a "mariage de raison" – marriage of convenience.

• David Laws, the Lib Dem former chief secretary to the Treasury, says in an article in the Daily Telegraph that the government should consider cutting taxes for the middle classes before the next election.

Towards the end of this Parliament, as the deficit targets are met, securing social recovery will require more of the future proceeds of growth to be invested in education, health and welfare reform. Just as in the private sector, these services cannot be delivered without adequate funding.

But if we can continue the spending discipline in other areas of the public sector, we will also create the scope for tax reductions. Once the £10,000 personal allowance is delivered, there will be a strong case for looking at the burden on those in employment on low and middle incomes. After tax, national insurance, graduate contributions and pension payments, some of these individuals will face marginal deduction rates of almost 50 per cent. That may be necessary in the tough times, but it will hardly be acceptable once the deficit is eliminated.

12.07pm: John Mann, a Labour MP who sits on the Commons Treasury committee, has said that he will vote against the Irish bailout if he gets the chance.

What George Osborne has chosen to do is use money from the average taxpayer to bail out the bankers - including British bankers - yet again. What is extraordinary is the way Osborne has dealt with this bail-out. Ireland has been allowed to keep its rock-bottom corporation tax rate, but again at the expense of the British taxpayer, with firms like Northern Foods relocating to Dublin just last week.

12.15pm: Lord Myners, the Labour former City minister, has responded to the FT report saying George Osborne plans to water down rules forcing bank pay and bonusworth more than £1m to be disclosed. (See 11.52am.) Myners was talking to Sky's Mark Kleinman, who has posted the quotes on his blog. Myners said this was "a very significant departure from the coalition agreement, which emphasised the vital importance of strengthening the banking system and tackling bank bonuses".

1.11pm: Here's a lunchtime summary:

• George Osborne, the chancellor, has defended his decision to offer the Irish a loan worth around £7bn. "Ireland is a friend in need and we're here to help," he told the Today programme this morning. He will have more to say to MPs when he makes a statement in the Commons at around 4.20pm. But some MPs have already criticised the decision. "We keep on being told we're not in the euro but the euro turns out to be as much a debt union as a currency and monetary union and it seems we are part of that debt union," the Tory MP Douglas Carswell said. (See 9.24am, 9.39am and 12.07pm.)

•Housing groups have criticised the government's plans to allow councils and housing associations to offer fixed-term tenancies. The proposals will not affect existing tenants, but will mean that social landlords will have the right to offer fixed-term tenancies to new tenants. The new tenancies will have to last for a minimum of two years. Grant Shapps, the housing minister, said the current rules, which means that social landlords have to offer lifetime tenancies, appear "to reduce incentives to work and to leave people trapped in poverty". But the National Housing Federation said short-term tenancies would leave people trapped in poverty. "It's difficult to imagine a more powerful disincentive to do well than the threat of losing your home if you start earning too much," said the NHF, which represents housing associations. (10.26am and 10.56am.)

• David Cameron has announced new "big society awards".They will go to individuals or groups that illustrate the big society in action. Cameron has invited people to nominate candidates through a form on the Downing Street website and he has named Central Surrey Health, a social enterprise providing healthcare in Surrey, as the first winner of an award. Winners will get a certificate and an invitation to a reception in Downing Street.

•Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, has criticised the government for dropping plans to publish a growth white paper before the end of the year. "There were signs that the new government understood that it had a role in promoting growth and rebalancing the economy through an active industrial policy and investment in a low carbon future. But this decision sends out all the wrong signals," Barber said. He was responding to a report in the Financial Times (subscription) saying the plans for a white paper have been "quietly dropped after George Osborne, the chancellor, decided he needed more time to draw up a coherent strategy".

2.00pm: Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor, has also responded to the news that George Osborne may water down plans requiring banks to disclose details of people earning more than £1m. (See 11.52am.)

Labour legislated for this last year, implementing a recommendation in a report on City pay from Sir David Walker. The rule would force banks to reveal how many employees are receiving remuneration packages (including pay and bonuses) worth more than £1m, broken down into pay bands. But it has not actually been implemented, and today the FT is saying Osborne may water it down.

This is what Johnson has said:

Labour legislated to make bankers' bonuses more transparent. For all their rhetoric the government have yet to implement that legislation. The public have a right to this information.

2.18pm: John Denham, the shadow business secretary, was on the World at One. According to PoliticsHome, which was monitoring the interview, he said that the policy reviews being announced by Ed Miliband would not be expected to come up with instant results.

The biggest mistake I think [Ed Miliband] could make would be to go out now six months after we lost a general election and set out a series of headline-grabbing, detailed policies which would undoubtedly look out of date and wrong in four years' time.

Asked about the possibility of Miliband wanting to sever links with the unions, Denham suggested that instead Miliband would want to involve trade unionists more fully in the party.

I'd be surprised if we don't start a discussion about the trade unionists who are out there, who support the Labour party, who pay money for the Labour party through their trade unions and how we can engage them more fully in the work of the Labour party.

2.34pm: Nimbyism is alive and well in the Conservative party. Tim Montgomerie at ConservativeHome says that two Conservative associations are going to withhold money from Conservative HQ because they are opposed to the government's plans to build the high-speed rail link (HS2) through Buckinghamshire.

News has just reached me that two of Britain's most prosperous Conservative Associations - Chesham & Amersham (represented by Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan) and Buckingham - have told CCHQ that they will be leaving the 'Premier League of Associations' and ending, therefore, their commitment to contribute £10,000pa to central funds as part of that League. My source predicted that all Buckinghamshire Tory Associations might do the same, in protest at Coalition plans to build a £17bn High-Speed Rail Link (HS2) through the county. The feeling is that private meetings with Transport Secretary Philip Hammond and Party Chairman Sayeeda Warsi have been fruitless. Conversations with Philip Hammond were described as a "dialogue of the deaf".

2.47pm: Grant Shapps, the housing minister, is facing more criticism over his plans to allow councils and housing associations to offer short-term tenancies. (See 10.26am and 10.56am.)

This is from the TUC.

There is a real danger that weakening the security of those in local authority housing could have the unintended side-effect of making it harder for council tenants to pursue the fullest possible range of employment opportunities. Fear of losing your home would be a strong incentive not to take any risks.

And this is from Ian Wingfield, deputy leader of Southwark council. Southwark is London's biggest local authority landlord, with 40,000 tenants and a waiting list of 15,000.

Proposals to end the right to a council house for life and introducing new, shorter tenancies for new tenants based on assessments will create a climate of instability and uncertainty with people potentially forced to move as their circumstances change.

In the six months since the general election no fewer than 111 new peers have been created. This swells the ranks of those presently entitled to attend the Lords to 792. Add in the 39 peers who are on 'leave of absence' or otherwise temporarily excluded from membership and the overall potential size of the chamber reaches 831.

For comparison, just after the Lords was reformed in 1999 to remove most hereditary peers there were 666 members (at which point it was already by far the largest second chamber in the world). In the ten years that followed this number crept gradually upwards, to around 700 in May this year. But the rate of appointments since then has been unprecedented, threatening to create a larger and larger chamber which becomes politically unmanageable, increases demands on the public purse, and loses the respect of voters. Putting it bluntly, this simply has to stop.

•Nicholas Watt on his Guardian blog says George Osborne had the chance to veto the Labour decision which he criticised on the Today programme this morning to sign Britain up for the European financial stability mechanism.

Mr Bush was not just born into high politics, he was a genuinely impressive and instinctive retail politician: brilliant at the business of charming a room full of ordinary voters and putting them at their ease. Mr Cameron is not the son of a prime minister, but he does have a born-to-rule self-confidence, the natural authority of an army officer from a good regiment (as I have written before). Most of the time, that makes him an exceptionally comfortable person to watch in action: Mr Cameron is a living breathing demonstration of the theory that good manners essentially boil down to making sure to put others at their ease.

3.35pm: David Cameron is now making his statement to the Commons about the Nato summit.

3.36pm: Cameron says there were effectively three summits: one about Afghanistan, one about the future of Nato, and a Nato-Russia meeting.

On Afghanistan, Cameron says all Nato members expressed their commitment to the Afghan operation. The summit reached important conclusions about the timetable for the handover of responsibility for security to the Afghans. This timetable is consistent with Britain's deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops by 2015. By 2015 Britain will have been in Helmand for nine years - almost as long as the first world war and the second world war combined. From 2015 there will not be British troops in Afghanistan in anything like the number there are now and they will not be there in a combat role.

3.40pm: On the future of Nato, Cameron says Nato agreed to develop a ballistic missile defence system for Europe. It will be in place by the end of the decade, and paid for from Nato's existing resources.

Nato savings will save Britain tens of millions of pounds.

On Russia, Cameron says relations between Nato and Europe have been strained. There will remain "challenges" in the relationship. Russia should withdraw its troops from Georgia, Cameron says. But issues like this should not stop Russia and Nato working together where they can.

Nato remains "the future of our bedrock defence", Cameron says.

3.45pm: Ed Miliband starts with a tribute to the British troops in Afghanistan.

Labour supports the outcome of the Nato summit, he says. He supports Afghanistan taking responsibility for security by 2014. And he thinks Cameron's plans for the withdrawal of British troops by 2015 is right.

But what milestones will the government use to track progress towards withdrawal?

Miliband asks what training role British troops will play after 2015. Training often involves fighting, Miliband says. So will the British be fighting?

And what discussions has Cameron had with President Karzai about reconciliation?

3.49pm: Cameron is responding to Ed Miliband's questions. He says there are three milestones for progress: the build-up of the Afghan police; the development of governance; and an assurance that progress is irreversible.

On training, he says he imagines the British being involved in training but not combat after 2015.

He says he has discussed reconciliation with Karzai.

He does not address Miliband's question about tactical nuclear weapons.

3.51pm: Sir Malcolm Rifkind asks about tactical nuclear weapons. Cameron says the problem is that relations between Russia and Nato have been difficult over recent years. But they are "thawing", Cameron says.

4.02pm: Bob Ainsworth, the Labour former defence secretary, asks Cameron why he was so specific about a deadline for British withdrawal. (Many in the military think a deadline is a mistake, because it will encourage the Taliban.)

Cameron says the British public have a right to know when the troops will come home. He also says that the alternative to a single, far-off deadline would be a series of mini-deadlines. That would be unhelpful, Cameron says.

4.19pm: George Osborne is making his statement about the Irish bailout now. My colleague Graeme Wearden will be covering it in full on his Irish bailout live blog.

5.31pm: George Osborne has finished his statement now. And I'm finishing for the day. First, here's an evening summary:

• George Osborne said MPs would get the chance to vote on the proposed £7bn-odd loan to Ireland. In a statement to parliament, the chancellor said that when the European Union creates a permanent bailout mechanism for countries in the eurozone, Britain would not participate. He also played down the prospects of Britain bailing out any other EU countries, stressing that there were "very specific" reasons for Britain needing to help Ireland (the British and Irish economies and banking systems are closely linked, and the two countries share a border). But Osborne would not explicitly rule out any further bailouts. The chancellor would not reveal the exact size of the proposed British loan to Ireland, but he has already suggested it will be worth around £7bn. (See 9.24am.) He also refused to say that Ireland should raise its corporation tax. "Countries should be free to set their own tax rates," Osborne said. Many MPs expressed unhappiness about the loan. Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor, said Labour supported what Osborne was doing in principle, although he had fun reminding Osborne about an article Osborne wrote four years ago saying Britain should learn from the Irish economic "miracle". My colleague Graeme Wearden has more on his Irish bailout live blog.

•The TUC has accused the government of failing to deal with public anger about City bonuses. Responding to reports that George Osborne may water down plans requiring banks to disclose details of people earning more than £1m (see 11.52pm and 2pm), Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, said:

This may be a triumph for the bankers' lobby, but ministers are mistaken if they think this will head off public anger at mega-bonuses at a time of supposed austerity for all. The biggest financial crash since the 1930s was caused by giving too much power to banks. Not only are we back to business as usual for bonuses, but it looks once again as if the banks are calling the shots with government.

•David Cameron reaffirmed his commitment to withdraw British troops from Afghanistan by 2015. In a statement to the Commons about the Nato summit, he said: "By 2015 Britain will have played a huge role in the international coalition and made massive sacrifices for a better, safer and stronger Afghanistan. We will have been in Helmand, by some way the toughest part of Afghanistan, for nine years, a period almost as long as the first and second world wars combined."